9781529955484

THE INSIDE STORY

OF THE GREATEST GOLF EVER PLAYED

THE TIGER SLAM KEVIN COOK

Tiger Woods’s Tiger Woods’shistoric year historic year2000-1

THE TIGER SLAM

ALSO BY KEVIN COOK

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Ten Innings at Wrigley

Electric October

The Dad Report

Kitty Genovese

The Last Headbangers

Flip

Titanic Thompson Driven

Tommy’s Honor

THE TIGER SLAM

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE GREATEST GOLF EVER PLAYED KEVIN COOK

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To

Pamela, my love

THE TIGER SLAM

PROLOGUE GRAND OPENING

What was it all about?

For Eldrick Tont Woods, it wasn’t enough to win trophies, tournaments, millions of dollars, the crowd’s adulation, the whole world’s attention. All of that was cool, he said, but he wanted more. He had always expected wealth, fame, and record-setting success, had known it was coming since he was a toddler hitting golf balls on national television. Growing up on hardscrabble public courses, he had learned the game from his father, who had nicknamed him “Tiger” to honor a fellow soldier who had saved his life in Vietnam. Soon young Tiger was beating players more than twice his age. He was signing autographs before he learned cursive writing. He broke 80 for the first time when he was eight and 70 when he was twelve. With every early victory he pictured himself older—all grown up, knocking drives out of sight, sinking putts, lifting trophies, smiling on TV.

That is exactly what happened. After winning three U.S. Amateur Championship titles to set a record that still stands, he turned

professional in 1996. Within a year he was the youngest golfer ever to be ranked number one in the world. At twenty-one, he won the Masters by a dozen strokes. By then much of America was in thrall to “Tigermania.” Crowds followed wherever he went. Fortune 500 companies threw endorsement money at him. Magazines from Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated to Newsweek, People, and GQ put him on their covers. Rappers name-checked him. “Tiger Woods transcends golf,” Oprah Winfrey announced. “He is magical and mesmerizing.”

Which led to a question few people ever face: What do you do after your dreams come true?

For Tiger, the answer was simple: Dream bigger.

Later years would diminish his magic and change the world’s perception of him. A younger generation would know Tiger Woods as tabloid fodder, a balding, limping, middle-aged celebrity in recovery from sex addiction and car crashes that sent his life careening out of control. But all that is in the future. This story is set at the turn of the twenty-first century, the height of Tigermania, when the best player of his time set a challenge for himself.

He was already the most famous golfer in history, a charismatic young man looking for new ways to leave an indelible stamp on the ancient game. A handsome, charismatic young Black man dominating a sport known for its whiteness. In the late 1990s, not even one in fifty golfers was Black. You would have needed a crowd of more than two hundred golfers to put together a Black foursome, and that group would not have been welcome at many of America’s best courses. Tiger knew how that felt. As a teenager he had been called “a little n——” and chased off a driving range. He was so familiar with the glare golfers of color often got at country clubs that he had a name for it: “the Look.”

But here he was, not yet twenty-five, beating his supposed social superiors at their own game, making golf more popular than ever, and doing it with the crowd-pleasing style of a showman. When Tiger

Woods won, it was often by record-setting margins, with shots other players didn’t dare try. What would he do next? His long-term goal was to surpass Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major championships, but that would take many years, even for him. In the late 1990s, he had something more immediate in mind.

A lifelong student of the game, Tiger knew that Bobby Jones had won golf’s original Grand Slam in 1930. Jones, a gentleman lawyer who played in a dress shirt and tie, swept that year’s U.S. Open, Great Britain’s Open Championship, and two events reserved for nonprofessionals, the U.S. Amateur and British Amateur, to win the so-called impregnable quadrilateral. Thirty years later, Arnold Palmer opened the championship season by winning the 1960 Masters and U.S. Open. Amateur events had lost their luster, but there was talk that Palmer might achieve “a latter-day duplicate” of Jones’s feat including the Masters, both Opens, and the PGA Championship. On the long flight to Scotland for the 1960 Open Championship, he discussed the idea with a reporter. “Why don’t we create a new Grand Slam?” Palmer asked. He went on to lose the Open Championship by a stroke, ending any Slam speculation for the year, but the seed was planted. Golf writers began describing a professional Grand Slam as the game’s ultimate goal. Yet Palmer never won more than two majors in a row. Jack Nicklaus never won more than two in a row. Even today, no golfer since Ben Hogan in 1953 has won even three consecutive major championships. With one exception.

On the night after his twelve-shot Masters victory in 1997, Tiger flew home to Florida with his friend and mentor PGA Tour veteran Mark O’Meara. As their Gulfstream II approached Orlando, Tiger brought up a short-term goal: “A Grand Slam. Do you think it’s possible?”

O’Meara, eighteen years older, had played in fifty-four majors without finishing better than third. “No,” he said. “It’s unrealistic.” Tiger said, “I think it could be done.”

ONE WINNING STREAK

The sixteen months that changed golf forever began on December 30, 1999, when Tiger Woods celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday with family and friends at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. A night later, on New Year’s Eve, he hosted a fundraiser for the Tiger Woods Foundation in a Fairmont Scottsdale Princess ballroom. A deejay rocked the walls with Prince’s 1999. The evening’s host joined several hundred paying guests in spectacular fashion, leading an entourage that included his parents, Earl and Kultida Woods; his girlfriend, Joanna Jagoda, a brilliant and beautiful law student; his friend Mark O’Meara; and several buddies from his college days at Stanford. As midnight approached, Natalie Cole sang “Unforgettable” to Tiger. Later they all toasted the new millennium with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, midnight hugs and kisses. And then it was the year 2000.

Later that week, he joined thirty other pros for the season-opening Mercedes Championships at the Kapalua Resort on Maui. Each

January, the previous year’s PGA Tour winners gathered for sunshine and luaus for an event some of them still called by its traditional name, the Tournament of Champions. At the first tee, hula dancers crooned the golfers’ names. Twenty-four of the players had qualified by winning a single PGA Tour title in 1999. Defending champion David Duval had topped all but one of the others with four wins, but that left him far behind the world’s top-ranked golfer. Tiger had won the 1999 PGA Championship, his second major, before reeling off four straight victories to run his total for the year to eight, the most in more than half a century.

On Thursday, January 6, 2000, he teed up a 90-compression Titleist Professional ball and knocked it toward Moloka‘i. It was like hitting your first drive of the year into a postcard. The Plantation Course at Kapalua snakes through seaside hills, long but toothless unless the island’s trade winds kick up. They blew hard that week. Tiger traded three-hundred-yard drives and birdie putts with Ernie Els down the stretch on Sunday, when the first eagle-eagle finish in PGA Tour history sent them to sudden death.

They both birdied the first playoff hole. Tiger liked that. The higher the stakes and the tighter the fight, the more he enjoyed the game he felt he was born to play. On the second playoff hole he looked over a long birdie putt with his caddie, Steve Williams. It was a downhill forty-footer. The slope would make it slippery, but the grass between his ball and the hole was a dark shade of green rather than a shiny silver-green. That meant the putt would go against the grain. Earlier in the week, Tiger had watched Els miss the same putt. He told Williams, “It’s going to break, but not as much as it looks.”

Steve Williams was a jut-jawed New Zealander who raced cars on dirt tracks in his spare time and called his man “Tigah.” He had replaced Mike “Fluff” Cowan on Tiger’s bag after Cowan, a Falstaffian character with a bushy white mustache, got too famous for Tiger and Earl Woods, who didn’t like seeing Fluff in TV

commercials. Tiger had fired Cowan in 1999 and hired Williams, who served as Tiger’s body man as well as his caddie, fending off fans, reporters, and photographers. The two of them sometimes bickered over club selections or putting lines, but they were usually on the same wavelength.

Now they studied Tiger’s forty-foot putt. Later, watching a tape of the telecast, he would hear ESPN’s Curtis Strange describe it as “not makeable.” But what did Strange know? Three and a half years before, he had mocked Tour rookie Woods during an on-camera interview. When Tiger said he expected to win every event he played, Strange had laughed and said, “You’ll learn!”

Williams tilted the flagstick over the cup, giving his man a target. He pulled the flag away as the putt broke two and a half feet, losing speed all the way. Turning over one last time, it fell in. Tiger threw a punch at the sky. His victory made him the first to win five tournaments in a row since Ben Hogan in 1948.

The runner-up was gracious as usual. Els, two inches taller and six years older than Tiger, was a former prodigy whose junior golf records had lasted until Tiger broke them. They had the same number of majors to their credit—Els the 1994 and 1997 U.S. Opens, Woods the 1997 Masters and 1999 PGA Championship—which didn’t keep reporters from asking Ernie if it was exciting to play with Tiger. He nodded. “He’s a legend in the making. He’s probably going to be bigger than Elvis. Look at Nicklaus, look at Bobby Jones—I think Tiger is in the same group. He’s going to be awfully tough to beat in the majors this year.”

A month later, the Tour’s annual West Coast Swing took them to Pebble Beach for one of Tiger’s favorite tournaments. At the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the world’s best golfers teamed with celebrity hackers including Bill Murray, who clowned his way around the course, dancing with fans and tossing banana peels at the professionals. Tiger was well off the lead by Sunday, seven shots behind with

seven holes to play. Then he lofted a pitching wedge that landed snowflake soft and spun into the hole for an eagle deuce. He turned to a TV camera and crowed, “I’m back in it!”

Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov, a bogey golfer who joined Murray, Kevin Costner, Jack Lemmon, and Alice Cooper in that week’s amateur field, marveled at Tiger’s sense of the moment. “This isn’t my stage or my audience. My audience doesn’t walk right up and gather around me,” Baryshnikov said. “Tiger is amazing. There are people pressing all around him, standing just off his shoulder, and he can still dance.”

Peter Ueberroth played in the same foursome that day. A former Major League Baseball commissioner and Time’s 1984 Man of the Year, Ueberroth watched Tiger barely miss holing another wedge for eagle at the sixteenth hole. “After a while,” he said, “you’re believing he can hole them all.” Woods came from behind to win again, running his streak to six tournaments in a row.

A week after that, at the Buick Invitational, he trailed Phil Mickelson by seven strokes with twelve holes left. Mickelson was another former teen phenom, a left-hander who could knock a drive out of sight or flip a flop shot into your pocket. Tiger caught him with a birdie at the thirteenth. Then the seemingly impossible happened again: he faltered, making back-to-back bogeys. “At least I made it interesting for Phil,” he said. Asked about stopping his rival’s winning streak, Mickelson said, “I didn’t want to be the bad guy. I just wanted to win.”

In February, Northern Ireland’s Darren Clarke reached the milliondollar final at the Andersen Consulting Match Play Championship. So did Tiger. He had few friends among the other Tour pros, a cutthroat breed of independent contractors vying for the same pots of gold every week, but he liked Clarke, who could down a pint of Guinness in one lengthy quaff. They met for breakfast before their final match. Clarke, who carried a few extra pounds on his six-foot-two

frame, had a warning: “If you hole a long snake and give one of those run-across-the-green fist pumps, I’m coming after you with a big Irish fist of my own.”

“Give it your best shot,” Tiger said. “You’re so fat you couldn’t catch me!”

He couldn’t catch Clarke that day. He settled for second place and $500,000, then won the Bay Hill Invitational, an event he played as a favor to its host, Arnold Palmer. Woods had now won seven times in his last ten tries, with two second-place finishes. After another runner-up finish at the Players Championship, he skipped the BellSouth Classic to hone his game for the 2000 Masters.

The invitational that Bobby Jones founded in 1934 is the main event on golf’s spring calendar, the first major of the year. Tiger spent more time preparing for the Masters than for any other tournament, spending much of the winter and early spring in long practice sessions with his swing coach, Butch Harmon, and his caddie, Williams, at his home course in the gated community of Isleworth, Florida, working on shots he would need at Augusta National Golf Club in April: a drive over the pines at the par-4 ninth; a sweeping draw around the dogleg at the thirteenth. He often finished with a high fade, the tee ball he planned to hit off the first tee at Augusta. If he struck it just right, he would turn on his heel and start for the parking lot, the drivingrange version of a mic drop.

TWO WELCOME TO THE CLUB

Every April, the sleepy riverside town of Augusta, Georgia, becomes golf’s capital. The city’s population more than doubles during Masters week. Traffic crawls on Washington Road, where in 2000 there were long waits for booths at the Howard Johnson’s and the Waffle House across the road from Augusta National Golf Club.

On Tuesday, April 4, 2000, a select few golfers in courtesy cars turned off Washington Road onto Magnolia Lane and dined more grandly in Augusta National’s white clapboard clubhouse.

Tiger stopped into the Champions Locker Room to pick up his jacket before dinner. The green jacket, symbolizing his runaway victory at the 1997 Masters, was a 42 regular. He looked forward to the annual Champions Dinner, one of his favorite Masters traditions. Each year, former winners gather in a second-floor banquet room for drinks and a multicourse meal. The previous year’s winner selects the menu, which often features cuisine from his home country, and picks

up the tab. “Just to be looking at the real Byron Nelson and the real Gene Sarazen,” great players his father used to tell him about, had amazed the youngest member of the fraternity when he had hosted his first Champions Dinner in 1998. “I’m over here with Mr. Nelson on my left, Ben Crenshaw on my right, and here we are with dinner knives in our hands, demonstrating our grips.” Nelson had been eighty-six years old that night. Sarazen, the celebrated “Squire” who had invented the sand wedge and won the second ever Masters in 1935, was ninety-six and not crazy about the menu the new champion chose that night: cheeseburgers, french fries, and milkshakes. “Cheeseburgers!” Sarazen said. “Who ever heard of a cheeseburger dinner?” Tiger vowed to do better if and when he won again.

In 2000, he was one of three dozen Masters winners enjoying predinner drinks and defending champion José María Olazábal’s fourcourse menu of chilled shrimp with salmon and mayonnaise, hake with pimientos, beef filets in red wine sauce, and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. As usual, many of the international players sat with Gary Player. Tiger sat with O’Meara, who had won the 1998 Masters, and their friends Palmer and Nicklaus. Fred Couples, Raymond Floyd, and Tom Watson sat nearby. “Lord Byron” himself opened the festivities. Sarazen had died the year before, leaving the kindly, eighty-eightyear-old Nelson as the oldest of them. Looking around at Nicklaus, Palmer, Sam Snead, Watson, Player, Nick Faldo, and two dozen others, he said he had been delighted when reporters asked if Tiger might top his streak of eleven straight tournament victories in 1945.

“I want to thank Tiger Woods,” Nelson said, “for making today’s young people know what I did fifty-five years ago.”

The green-jacketed champions applauded. One was 1979 Masters winner Fuzzy Zoeller. He and Sam Snead always sat together at the dinner, dueling to see which of them could tell the dirtiest joke while more high-minded champions tried not to laugh. Zoeller, a Hoosier quipster from New Albany, Indiana, had joked about the menu the

Tiger Woods played and practiced with his friend and mentor, Mark O’Meara.

day Tiger became the first Black Masters champion. “Tell him not to serve fried chicken next year,” Zoeller told reporters, snapping his fingers, “or collard greens, or whatever the hell they serve.” He soon apologized but lost endorsement deals with Adidas and Kmart. Tiger publicly forgave him, announcing, “We all make mistakes. I accept Fuzzy’s apology.” When the two of them met for lunch a month later, Zoeller apologized again. Tiger accepted that Zoeller “was trying to acknowledge that I had kicked everybody’s ass that week.” He forgave but didn’t forget.

It was hard to forget race in Augusta, even if he wasn’t as Black as people like Zoeller thought. Asked about his racial identity on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he described himself as “Cablinasian”—part Caucasian, part Black, part American Indian, part Asian. He was the American melting pot in one golfer, Black and Cherokee on his father’s side and Thai, Chinese, and Dutch on his mother’s. Still, the world saw him as Black. As Earl Woods put it, “The boy only has about two drops of Black blood in him, but in this country there are only two colors, white and nonwhite. And he ain’t white.”

Tiger and his father, who grew up in the segregated town of Manhattan, Kansas, knew all about Augusta National’s fraught racial history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the club’s founders, Bobby Jones and the investment banker Clifford Roberts, had enjoyed “battle royal” boxing bouts, melees that pitted half a dozen blindfolded Black men against one another. Some were Augusta National caddies. They punched and brawled until only one was left standing. Wealthy white patrons flipped silver dollars into the ring for the winner to collect.

Roberts, who ran the Masters for forty years, claimed he had nothing against “our dark-complected friends.” Even so, he insisted, “As long as I am alive, the caddies will be Black and the players will be white.” No Black golfer was invited to the tournament until Lee Elder in 1975, the year Tiger Woods was born. Roberts was still alive, but not for long. One morning two years later the ailing eighty-three-year-old

founder got a haircut in the club’s barbershop. Then he walked out to Augusta National’s par-3 course, sat down beside a pond, pulled a .38-caliber revolver from his pocket, and blew his brains out. It would be thirteen more years before the most exclusive club in golf admitted a Black member. Even after that, one scholarly study described Augusta National as golf’s “epicenter of discrimination and exclusion.” Tiger was more diplomatic, saying he had “developed a respect for the course and the Masters, but I would never refer to it as a ‘cathedral in the pines’—the term you hear every April.”

Earl Woods was more outspoken about race than his son was. One night, sipping champagne at one of Tiger’s victory parties, he said, “How do you like this, Bobby Jones? A Black man is the best golfer who ever lived. Bobby Jones can kiss my son’s Black ass.”

In the year and a half after Tiger earned his green jacket in 1997, it was his hips that needed attention. They tended to fire too fast on his downswing, turning toward the target too quickly and forcing him to make handsy, last-instant corrections at impact. Working with swing guru Harmon, the Masters champion rebuilt what was already the best swing in the game, grooving a new move that synchronized the rotation of his upper body, hips, and legs. He did it by hitting thousands upon thousands of range balls in 1997 and 1998—“digging it out of the dirt,” as Ben Hogan used to say—to forge the fearful symmetry that was now second nature. By the time he teed off on a breezy Thursday morning, he was such a prohibitive favorite to win the 2000 Masters that you could bet on him or take the same odds on the rest of the ninety-five-man field. The betting line made sense to Tom Watson, who had won eight major championships including the 1977 and 1981 Masters. “Tiger has better flexibility than anybody,” he said. “He works out harder than anybody, hits the ball farther than anybody, putts better than anybody, and chips better than anybody.”

But that day he played worse than thirty-eight players, including Olazábal, Els, Duval, and sixty-year-old Jack Nicklaus. After an evenpar front nine, his approach shot at the long, downhill tenth plugged into a greenside bunker. He muscled his Titleist onto the green but three-putted for a double bogey. His 8-iron into a swirling breeze at the par-3 twelfth fell short and slipped back into Rae’s Creek. After a penalty stroke, he pitched onto the green and three-putted from twelve feet for a triple bogey. The golfer with the multimillion-dollar smile looked like he had spent three hours sucking lemons. He rallied with a pair of late birdies but shot 75. A steady 72 on Friday got him to the weekend. He charged into contention with a front-nine 33 on Sunday but then fell short, six shots behind Vijay Singh.

“For some reason, the golfing gods weren’t looking down on me,” he said. His aim in retooling his swing had been to minimize the effects of swirling winds, biorhythms, and the strokes of good and bad luck golfers call the rub of the green, becoming so much better than anyone else that the gods could just sit back and watch him win. His fifth-place finish at the Masters proved that he wasn’t there yet.

He skipped the next four tournaments. News reports had him “taking a month off,” but that wasn’t quite right. He was working on a secret project, testing a ball so new that it didn’t yet have a name.

THREE SPIN

One morning, Tiger was chipping balls around with Mark O’Meara. He watched O’Meara’s chips nip the green and check up closer to the hole than his. After a while he asked, “How do you get the ball to do that?”

His buddy “Marko” was one of a few friends who could needle him. “Don’t worry, T,” he said. “You’ll learn. It takes skill and maturity.”

They kept it up with the same results until Tiger tried a few chips with the ball O’Meara was playing, a Top Flite Strata Tour with a solid core and a new-age polyurethane cover. In no time he was spinning and stopping chips as if they were on a string.

“It wasn’t you. It’s the ball!”

O’Meara nodded. “You’re catching on,” he said. “Let me explain something to you. You are playing an archaic golf ball.” He wasn’t pushing Top Flite in particular. In fact, a less prominent brand had hired some of the best golf ball designers in the industry. “Bridgestone

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